Sunday, April 04, 2010

Update 2010-04-05: After some consideration and experimentation, it looks like I'll end up migrating to Wordpress. It seems to have more and better features built in. I'll keep posting here for a little while, till I get things set up at the new site and can notify anyone who has me blogrolled that I know about (which may even be before my next real post).Status Update: Redirect temporarily disabled while I work on things.

I've been looking for a while now for a way to make my blog more mobile-friendly. I've noticed that, while the layout I'm using works fairly well with my Palm Pre, it's not really optimal. Then one day I went to Gun Nuts Media on my phone and saw they have a mobile version that comes up automatically on my phone and realized that was what I was looking for. Alas, it turns out that Gun Nuts Media is on WordPress, and Blogger doesn't have that option. It seemed I was out of luck.

Looking into it again, in the vain hope that Blogger had joined the 21st century, I found a link to Flurp. Flurp converts a blog to a mobile friendly format (with a couple of different layouts for different phones). You can either insert code in the blog header that redirects mobile browsers to the mobile site automatically, or you can add a link to the mobile version. It's still in alpha, but it seems to work pretty well (though it does cut titles short after only about 15 characters on the iPhone version).

Right now, I've set it up to automatically redirect. I may change that in the future, depending on how it affects my usage and depending on any feedback I get from you, my readers.

Thursday, April 01, 2010

About 30 people circled together inside Owens Dining Hall Saturday afternoon to discuss a unified response. The meeting, led by Student Government Association president Brandon Carroll, tossed around several ideas in handling the church.

“We want everybody on the same page,” Carroll said.

[...]

The group voted, agreeing that a counter-protest will be formed.

It looks like the main victim of their protest will be Morgan Harrington.

Church officials said they were not protesting the 2007 shootings, saying they were “coming for the event that happened last month,” referencing slain student Morgan Harrington. A 20-year-old education major, Harrington was found in late January 2010 after going missing in October 2009 while attending a Metallica concert in Charlottesville, Va.

I still find it strikingly coincidental that this will be exactly one week before April 16.

Tech's LGBTA community has taken the opposite approach - ignore them and don't give them the reaction they're looking for.

The LGBTA community has also shown outrage about the church’s protest. Aimee Kanode, a senior humanities, science, and environment major at Tech and president of Tech’s LGBTA said she would not attend the protest, as she has work on the day of the protest.

“These people are awful, appalling, despicable,” Kanode said. “My method is to just ignore them. Me wasting energy on those people is not worth my time.” Kanode said that while the group would not officially organize for the protest, several members and officers would be in attendance. Kanode said she advised her members to “be smart about it.”

The bastards are probably hoping to distract from other events, too.

Another concern for community members is the potential for the protest to take away from other events for the day. Among the events scheduled for April 9 include a memorial for David Seth Mitchell, a US Marine killed in Afghanistan and Tech’s Relay for Life event, which is a fundraiser for cancer research.

They're trying to get their money's worth out of this trip, it seems. Scum.

NAIROBI, Kenya – Suspected Somali pirates fired on a U.S. Navy warship off East Africa early Thursday in what appeared to be a ransom-seeking attack on an American guided missile frigate, officials said.

The USS Nicholas returned fire on the pirate skiff, sinking it and confiscating a nearby mothership. The Navy took five pirates into custody, said Navy Lt. Patrick Foughty, a spokesman.

[...]

The U.S. Africa Command said the five pirates seized Thursday would remain in U.S. custody on board the frigate for now. The Nicholas is home-ported in Norfolk, Va.

Seizing or sinking the mothership and taking the pirates prisoner works a whole lot better than just letting them go. Hopefully, these pirates will go to jail for a long time.